South China Morning Post

On a day dedicated to preventing child abuse, Chinese people have found themselves debating a practice as old as civilization: beating children.

In some parts of the world, April 30 is recognized as Spank Out Day, initiated in 1998 by an American children’s rights group fighting corporal punishment.

While hitting children is illegal in the United States, it is not as heavily stigmatized in Chinese society, especially when the kids are your own.

That’s why debates over whether corporal…

Tantan, a popular Tinder-like dating app in China, has been removed from several app stores in the country amid a government crackdown on content that it considers inappropriate.

Since its founding in 2014, Tantan has grown into one of the country’s top dating apps with more than 100 million monthly users, according to figures released by the company.

The suspension of Tantan comes as Beijing has tightened its control over the Chinese internet under President Xi Jinping.

Chinese censors have…

Documentarian Hao Wu’s latest film, All in My Family, focuses on Chinese family tradition, gay relationships and children born using surrogacy through an extremely personal lens.

The film – set for release on Netflix this Friday – was shot over a series of Lunar New Year trips to Chengdu, in southwest China, from New York, where he settled 20 years ago.

We watch him agonize over when and how to tell his grandfather that he’s gay, married to his Chinese-American husband Eric and has two…

For many international students in US colleges, landing a job in the country could make their careers.

But for millions of Chinese students graduating with degrees in technology, the nerve-wracking process of getting an American work visa has been complicated by heightened tensions between the United States and China.

Chinese tech students in US colleges, especially those majoring in robotics, aviation, engineering and hi-tech manufacturing, say they have become collateral damage as…

Chinese President Xi Jinping is a fan of Game of Thrones, and he watches a version specially made to fit in his busy schedule, according to Chinese officials.

The leader surprised both his aides and guests when he brought up the HBO hit series during a meeting with foreign visitors in Beijing last week, a person at the meeting told the South China Morning Post. 

“We must all make sure the world we live in does not descend into the chaotic warring seven kingdoms of Westeros,” Xi said,…

China’s liberal thinkers have simmered with anxiety since Beijing stunned the world last March by scrapping a term limit on the Chinese presidency.

But few have stuck their necks out quite like Xu Zhangrun, a law professor at the prestigious Tsinghua University who openly criticized what he saw as Beijing’s dangerous march toward strongman rule under the Chinese Communist Party.

But while many of his peers saw the rebuke as an act of bravery, given the mounting pressure on China’s…

As negotiators from the United States and China grow closer to clinching a deal to end the trade war, both sides will be wary of the complications that can arise from issues of language, interpretation and translation during negotiations.

While both sides are negotiating in their native tongues with the help of simultaneous translation, the subsequent text will be translated into both English and Chinese. These translations will then be “scrubbed” by lawyers and technical translators in an…

China’s war on pollution caused air pollution in major cities to shift to less developed regions and led to an overall increase in emissions, a new study has found.

Researchers said that while toughened emission rules in urban areas had brought fresher air to the Chinese capital region, air pollution in the rest of China had worsened.

From 2012 to 2017, the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban region recorded a 34% decrease in hazardous particles known as PM2.5.

But the provinces surrounding the area…

Move over, Thanos. A Chinese city has decided that deadbeats are a more urgent matter to take care of.

A court in the eastern Chinese city of Lishui has teamed up with local theaters to make Marvel fans watch a video about bad debtors before they could watch the latest Avengers movie.

People who bought tickets to a midnight premiere of Avengers: Endgame on Wednesday in the city in Zhejiang province were first shown a minute-long video shaming 60 “untrustworthy” people who failed to pay their…

A Canadian court has rejected a lawyer’s claim that a Chinese home seller should have disclosed a violent death at the property because of her ethnicity.

Chinese-Canadian property investor Shao Feng Yun withdrew her C$6.1 million ($4.6 million) offer to buy a Vancouver mansion in 2009 after learning that the house’s former owner, a gang leader, was murdered outside its front gate.

The mansion was the residence the family of Raymond Huang Hong Chao, the leader of the Big Circle Boys gang,…